Salon has an interesting article
on the difficulty of many University students, faculty, and staff in
America of releasing their code under an open source license. Academic
development of free software is probably much more important than
commercial development, even though the latter has received much more
press over the last couple of years.

in security, you need to offset the risk with the cost. in mathematical
terms, security tends to zero as the sum of the number of idiots
increases to infinity. raph has pointed out that there is a new
attention-seeker on the block [in which case, why am i writing this?
*sigh*]. this article outlines a plan to consider, re-raising and
summarising a number of issues already discussed to increase advogato's
signal-to-noise ratio for open source discussion - which is what
advogato is all about.

The current debate between stalwarts of the Free Software and Open Source Software movements over
the basic principles of software distribution is harming all of us in a
very real way. Is there no hope for an end to this conflict?

I, along with some help from the Hackers-IL mailing list of which I am
a member, formulated a list of Open-Source rules', not unlike the
Ferengi Rules of
Acuiqisition. The Rules are still open and any additions are
welcome.

Just when you thought it was over, popular discursion site Kuro5hin is
back from the dead. The web site seems to be quite slow, proabably due
to massive load (I guess this submission won't solve that problem).

A new magazine called Free Software
Magazine will be published starting January 2002 by the Free
Software Foundation, China Academy. The table of contents is
already online, with the preface by Richard Stallman and topics include
GNOME, GNUStep, GnuPG, Zope and others. The editor also calls
for contributions from the free software community and projects like KDE. Apparently the first
issue will be published in English and Simplified Chinese.

Articles previously published elsewhere can also be submitted (by the
original authors/copyright holders) for publication in this magazine,
preferably but not necessarily under the GFDL.

E-mail encryption seems to be hard enough, or annoying enough,
that even many technically sophisticated people don't do it
regularly. Non-technical people rarely seem to be able to
figure it out at all.

Most academic software is released under a "free for academic use"
license, which makes it impossible to use such software in a free software
project. Some notable counterexamples exist. I am looking for more
examples of academic software that has been successfully released
under truly free licenses.

What follows is an e-mail interview with Bernhard Reiter and Bernhard
Herzog of Intevation, a German free software company. Bernhard Herzog
is also the author of Sketch, a vector-graphics editor written in
Python.

Thought the advogato community might be interested in a short report I have written based
on sourceforge project data. It gives a general overview of
projects housed at sourceforge. Any comments are greatly appreciated.

This article was written in response to the breakthrough in cell
biology, specifically, the events relating to cloning of human embryos.

A U.S. company said on Sunday it had cloned a human embryo in a
breakthrough aimed not at creating a human being but at mining the
embryo for stem cells used to treat disease. It is the first time anyone
has reported successfully cloning a human embryo, and biotechnology
company Advanced Cell Technology Inc., based in Worcester,
Massachusetts, said it hopes the experiment will lead to tailored
treatments for diseases ranging from Parkinson's to juvenile diabetes.
--Reuters

Seeing as how some anti-virus software
manufacturers will not be looking for the FBI's Magic Lantern
virus, it seems to me that the open source/free software community
should be doing what it does best: doing it ourselves.

Microsoft has taken a legal issue and attempted to force themselves upon
our children even more then they already are. Forcing a substandard
product that costs 100 times more then the compitition is not a lesson I
want my children to learn.